If I Were … A Daily Deals Site

For week two of our “How I would do email marketing if” series, lets dive into the recently popular business model of daily deals. As usual, let’s focus on the 4 steps of building your marketing platform:

Building your list

Automation

Campaigning

Monitoring Engagement

Step 1. Building your list

Daily Deals are pretty simple on this point. Building your list should be comprised almost completely of signup forms on your website. While there are some other acceptable methods, the best choice is to use other marketing methods to funnel your potential recipients to your web signup form. Be sure to customize your signup form and provide as many options as possible. In the daily-deals industry, sending targeted emails is key to seeing good recipient engagement.

Step 2. Automation

Automation for daily deals will not be quite the same to other industries. Obviously, to save work, you may consider automating the email creation process via conditional formatting. Since you are sending daily however, it is probably not a good idea to send more than a single welcome email to your new signup.

Step 3. Campaigning

Since you are a “daily deals” sender, obviously, you are going to be sending your recipients emails on a daily basis. One key component is the subject line. Your subject line should refer to the top deals of the day. A good example of a subject line might be:

DailyDealzCo 12/15/13 – Skis, Snowboards, and Lift Tickets

Not only are you identifying your brand, you are giving the client a quick snapshot of what the email is about. The idea here is simplicity. Keep things short and sweet. Campaign Design as always is up to you; however I would imagine a simplistic campaign that has an easy flow:

Header Section. Company Logo Header

Reminder. Remind the recipient when they signed up, and what their preferences are. Offer a link to update their preferences.

Deal 1. First Daily deal Item

Deal 2. Second Daily deal Item

Deal 3. Third Daily deal Item

Deal 4. Etc…

Footer. – A small branded footer reminding clients to update their preferences, or how to unsubscribe.

Again, this is just an example, be sure to design your campaign in a way that fits your needs, and matches the theme and branding of your product.

Step 4. Managing Engagement

In direct contrast to ToyzCo from last week, we are sending emails to recipients on a much more frequent basis. Because of this, we may not want to be quite as aggressive with our list hygiene policy.

Here is how I would approach List hygiene:

Three days after each campaign is sent, run a report on your list, and find any contact that has not opened the past 30 consecutive emails sent to them. Move this list of contacts into a new list, and prepare a re-engagement campaign for them.

“Hello {firstname},

We noticed that you haven’t opened the DailyDealzCo newsletter in a while. We do our best to make sure that we don’t send any unwanted emails, so we have automatically removed you from our list. Don’t worry, you can always re-subscribe if you want too, so that you can continue to receive our monthly newsletter and great deals on educational toys for your children.

If you would like to re-subscribe now, please click on the button below, or visit our website at any time.

{Subscribe_Button}

All the best,

Your friends at DailyDealzCo

I know what you are thinking. “He just copied that from last week’s blog.” You are correct. While there are some key differences to how you treat your email marketing efforts, the truth of the matter is that the ground rules remain the same, and because of that, many practices carry over identically.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully some of you retailers out there can use some of this advice to build a successful email marketing plan. If you would like to suggest an industry for me to do next, feel free to contact me at Richard@benchmarkemail.com.